


Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman

by hangingfire



Category: Confessions of Dorian Gray
Genre: Fix-It, Gen, Jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2013-08-28
Packaged: 2017-12-24 20:52:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/944522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/pseuds/hangingfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a moment Isobel has the mad idea that she could reach up and take one of those lovely hands and he would simply step down from the portrait, pausing to straighten the lapel on his frock-coat—or perhaps he would draw her up, to join him in a room scented with lilacs and warmed by the summer sun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman

**Author's Note:**

> This blatant, completely shameless fix-it fic is dedicated to my good pals F. and J., in hopes that it at least slightly repairs their crushed souls in the wake of "Running Away With You".

> All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
> 
> —From _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ , Oscar Wilde. Ward, Lock & Co., 1891

* * *

> Wotton’s diaries explain, at least in part, his decision to not pursue a libel case against Wilde; had he done so, he would have no doubt met with a fate similar to the playwright’s when he chose to do battle with the Marquess of Queensberry. But other mysteries remain, such as the ultimate fate of Basil Hallward, who after his disappearance haunts the following decade as a phantom riding the breath of rumour and hearsay. And then there is the matter of Mr. G—, whose full name was meticulously blotted out from every diary and letter, presumably by Wotton himself for reasons he never recorded.
> 
> —From _A House in Algiers: Lord Henry Wotton and Queer Identity in the Victorian Aristocracy_ , Dr Isobel Wotton, Rice University Press, 2050

* * *

A fine-art auction is far from Isobel Wotton’s natural habitat these days; she is uneasy amongst the American film-stars, the Chinese and Russian oligarchs, the last remnants of the British aristocracy who reap the benefits of a handful of perceptive ancestors who managed to invest their fortunes wisely long ago. The scent of money, she thinks: a compound of ambergris, tobacco, champagne grapes, old paper, and lavender. American money has a sharper, colder smell, shot through with petroleum and metal. She knows it well from the fundraisers at the American university where she teaches—a small, private institution in Texas—but this old-world money smell is the one that takes her back to childhood: the layered scents of sandalwood and Mitsouko on her mother’s formal sari, the Dunhills and gabardine of her father’s jacket.

Phillip, Marquess of Torbay, her older brother, sails through the exhibition room like a vast transport-jet, and Isobel (technically Lady Isobel, but she never uses her title if she can help it) is a tiny escort plane trailing in his massive wake. Too many people want to talk to them, and by the time they reach their destination, they have perhaps ten minutes before everyone must be seated so that the auction can begin. Phillip steps aside to talk to someone else and Isobel grabs greedily at those ten minutes, savouring her time with the object of her desire: the legendary, long-presumed-lost marvel that is Basil Hallward’s _Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman_.

She knows there’s no way she can have it; it’s expected to sell for millions of pounds. This is, after all, the painting said to have inspired Oscar Wilde to write his notorious novel, which he published not long after the mysterious disappearance of its painter. The painting was believed to have been destroyed by Hallward himself, and only resurfaced forty years ago at an estate sale in Kew in November 2012—the very same month, coincidentally, that Isobel was born. In her five-times-great-uncle’s diaries, she has read of his impressions of the painting as he first saw it in Hallward’s studio, and of his admiration for the beautiful young man known only as G—. The identity of G— is one of the great puzzles of Isobel’s career and that of many other academics in her field. Earlier scholars attempted to identify him with Wilde’s sometime inamorata and supposed basis for his ageless anti-hero John Gray, but the dates simply don’t work. Besides, that handsome young man was well-photographed and bears not the slightest resemblance to Hallward’s Unknown Gentleman. Looking on his marvellous face, Isobel feels her heart stop briefly, and then swell with a heavy beat that nearly aches.

(Premature ventricular contractions, or PVCs, her cardiologist said. A common condition, and provided everything else is healthy, nothing to be concerned about. Isobel gets them all the time, but they’re always the strongest when she’s anxious, overwhelmed, moved, or ill.)

 _A young man of extraordinary personal beauty_ —that was Oscar’s line about the pseudonymous Dorian Gray, wasn’t it? A boyish face—a puppyish face, she thinks, crowned with dark curly hair that demands to be ruffled. Features soft and innocent, eyes wide and blue, a mouth that you can’t imagine has ever kissed anyone. He stands in three-quarter view, his head tilted toward the viewer as if he’s just been surprised, pleasantly so. He is luminous against a dark background of Persian tapestries, lit by the soft sunlight streaming in from a silk-curtained window. Hallward was at the height of his powers when he painted this, his mastery of light and expression finer than Sargent, his gift for composition and psychological acuity more profound than Whistler, or so Isobel thinks; other critics are less sanguine, but then Isobel is a literature professor, not an art historian, and she is content to think as she pleases on such matters. Mr G— has the fine hands of a pianist and he stands next to a small table on which a sheet of Schumann’s “Forest Scenes” can just be discerned.

For a moment Isobel has the mad idea that she could reach up and take one of those lovely hands and he would simply step down from the portrait, pausing to straighten the lapel on his frock-coat—or perhaps he would draw her up, to join him in a room scented with lilacs and warmed by the summer sun. And then Phillip plucks at her sleeve, and the spell is broken.

“Come on, Isobel,” he says. “Time to leave your boyfriend. We’ll see him again soon enough.”

“Just in time for some Russian oil-magnate to spirit him away to St Petersburg,” Isobel grumbles. She glances back at young Mr G— one last time, and she and her brother take their seats.

* * *

She watches the first few lots with interest, but grows bored. She tries to check her email, but one of the auction house myrmidons scowls at her, and she switches her glasses off. She’s fighting the urge to doze off when _her_ lot—as she’s come to think of it—is announced.

“Lot 427, ladies and gentleman. _Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman_ , by Basil Hallward. The bidding starts at five hundred thousand. Five hundred—six, thank you, madame. Six hundred thousand; do I have—seven, thank you sir…”

Isobel’s heart lurches and pounds and she presses her fingers to the base of her throat as if that would quiet it. The numbers mount into nosebleed realms and beside her, Phillip is silent. He raises his card somewhere around the two million pound mark, and she nearly faints when he does so; she nearly faints again when he is outbid by a man in a well-cut suit who she recognises from one of her favourite Webflix shows.

Four and half million. Five! Isobel imagines Mr G— is laughing at them all, these rich, ignorant people willing to throw away their money on anything, as long as it’s useless. He almost seems to be smirking—a trick of the light and the angle from where she sits. She glances at Phillip; his sharp face is impassive. He had hinted at his intention to acquire something today, but he seems to be waiting this one out, ready for some other item that interests him more and will cost him less.

Seven million. Eight. The bidding stalls, the auctioneer raises his gavel—

And Phillip’s hand goes up.

Isobel’s heart stops and for a second she’s not sure if it’s going to start again; the delayed beat, when it comes, feels like a direct hit to the solar plexus.

“Nine million, ladies and gentlemen. Nine million. Nine million, going once? Going twice?”

The sound of the gavel strikes Isobel like a blow to the head.

“Sold, for nine million, to Lord Torbay. Thank you, my lord.”

Phillip grins at her and touches two fingers to the point of her chin to close her mouth, which she only just then realises has fallen open in shock. “Happy birthday, Isobel,” he says.

* * *

Isobel forgets, sometimes, just how wealthy her family is, what with the old, old Wotton fortune and her mother’s technology money. She has made herself forget. She never takes advantage of it; in Houston she lives in a small house with a thirty-year mortgage and considers her season tickets to the opera and to the Alley Theatre an extravagance. That her brother would casually spend nine million pounds on a fortieth birthday present (“But my birthday’s in November!” “It wasn’t going to be on auction in November, Bel.”) for his little sister who insists on living abroad on an academic’s salary—it almost makes her angry.

Almost.

Because now the portrait of Mr G— hangs on the wall in her study, having been shipped carefully and delicately across the Atlantic to its new home. It’s disgraceful, she thinks. All out of proportion to the room—to her _life_. She should lend it out, she thinks. The Houston Museum of Fine Arts would hang it happily, with a little plaque next to it—“Permanent loan, Collection of Dr. Isobel Wotton”—and it would be well-cared-for, admired. Liberated.

Liberated? Curious choice of word.

She’ll do that eventually. She owes it to posterity, to ensure that the painting isn’t lost again and has meticulous custodians who can monitor the humidity levels and keep the dust off. But for a little while—just this academic year, perhaps—she will be selfish and keep Mr G— to herself. After all, both the novel and Lord Henry Wotton’s diaries are emphatic on Hallward's reluctance to show the portrait. She can’t help a slight feeling of loyalty to her ancestor’s old friend, silly as it might seem, and determines to respect his wishes, for a while at least. After all, it’s been largely hidden for this long.

When the _Portrait of an Unknown Gentleman_ surfaced in 2012, after the death of its last owner, a Mr Charles White, it passed through at least five private collections before coming up at auction. Both the auction-house and Isobel did their due diligence, and the research was frustratingly vague; how it came into Mr White’s hands was a complete mystery, and after his bizarrely sudden illness and death, one owner after another bought it, refused to exhibit it, then sold it in surprisingly hasty fashion. The exact reasons were elusive. There were jokes that didn’t seem to be jokes that the painting was cursed.

Isobel enjoys gothic novels, but she is reasonably confident that she is not, in fact, living in one. She accepts that the painting discomfits people due to its strange history and association with a famously disturbing novel—that does not, to her, constitute a curse _per se_ ; merely a negative association, the way a house where an infamous murder took place is not so much haunted by ghosts as by the memories of those who know its history.

Isobel is a practical woman, one of the western world’s foremost scholars of queer Victorian letters and history, curator of the diaries and correspondence of Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward, and she does not believe in ghosts.

* * *

The fall semester begins. Every year she feels she must provide a verbal footnote on her family history to her Victorian Lit students; she learned even as a graduate student that the sharp ones always figure it out. One of her graduate advisees has heard about her brother’s auction purchase. Cecil wants to see the painting, but she lies to him and tells him it’s back at Morley Abbey for the time being.

She’s not sure why she lied.

In the first month of the semester, she doesn’t see much of Mr G—; her duties keep her in her offices at the university more than home, though she does make a point of at least checking in on the painting whenever she gets home. One day she actually catches herself saying hello to it.

Phillip is right, she thinks. I need a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Or perhaps just a cat.

She is irritable; she puts it down to the fact that she has never gotten used to the fact that Texas hasn’t got proper seasons, and that her brother is talking about fall when it’s still in the high twenties where she lives. One humid night in late September, she is working late in her study, grading papers under the gaze of Mr G—. It’s been a long week and she’s scrolling through some interminable undergraduate meandering on botanical imagery in Wordsworth when her eyelids start to grow heavy. The tablet slowly slides out of her hands, and she dozes off.

Mr G— turns toward the little table and picks up the sheet music. “Do you like Schumann, Lady Isobel? I’ll play for you, if you like. My mother used to play ‘The Prophet Bird’ for me, when I was very young.”

This isn’t the sofa in her study. She’s reclining on a divan covered with some antique fabric of Middle Eastern manufacture, looking up at this beautiful young man who smiles at her, everything about him the picture of innocent, dazzling youth. Except—there are shadows in the blue eyes, and something in the pitch of his voice—which is a lovely voice, sweet and rough like barley-sugar—that troubles her.

“I’m dreaming.”

“You are. But I really am talking to you.” He strides across the room, passing a massive easel next to a table strewn with paints, brushes, palette-knives, and seats himself at a piano in the opposite corner from the alcove where he’d been standing and arranges the music to play. “I know you can’t be Harry’s … however-many-times-great-granddaughter,” he says. “Niece, then? Who’s got the title, nowadays?” He starts to play, his fingers light on the keys.

“Father died ten years ago. My brother Phillip is the Marquess now.”

“Harry was the ‘spare’ too. At least you’ve made something of it.”

“What?” He says something in reply, but she can’t hear it; the piano is too loud, suddenly, and she slips from this dream to another less clear and more horrible—something about London in the Blitz, like you saw in the old newsreels, but with the colour and smell and smoke that you could only imagine, and bombed-out houses with ghostly faces in the windows.

There is a rush of heat and flame and she jerks awake, her clothes soaked in sweat. For some reason, it’s very important to her that she ensure that Mr G— is still there, and of course he is; he’s only a painting, after all. A beautiful boy captured on a summer day, impossibly cool, impossibly innocent.

Isobel rubs her eyes and gets up to get something to drink. She still has papers to mark.

* * *

The first cold snap of the season comes early, at the end of the first week in October, and with it, Isobel’s mood lifts. She decides she’s earned a little respite from her teaching schedule, and so she takes down the bound volumes that contain her personal facsimiles of the papers of Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward. The originals were gifted to the Bodleian after Isobel had used them to finish her doctoral thesis and spent five years transcribing and editing them for publication. It had made her something of an academic star at an early age, though she sometimes feels she’s cheated slightly. It’s like the family money that she tries not to spend. Her father had discovered the rosewood box containing the original papers during the renovation of Morley Abbey in 2035, and wary of all other scholars, he entrusted them to Isobel, who was just beginning her doctoral studies. Thus her path had been set—but there were worse fates, she knew, and luckily, her however-many-great-uncle’s diaries were enjoyable company.

With the digital concordance on her tablet beside her, she picks out each reference to Mr G—: the first mention of the “exquisitely Hellenic youth” encountered in Hallward’s studio, records of winters spent in a white-stucco house in Algiers, operas seen, hunting-parties attended. There are frustrating gaps in the record that neither she nor any other scholar has been able to resolve, lacunae where clues to the identity of Mr G— once existed: the missing pages covering a period of a fortnight not long after Lord Henry met Mr G—, the absence of half a year preceding the publication of Oscar’s novel, and the emptiest, most artful obliquities regarding Lord Henry's exile on the continent, where he fled to escape the notoriety of having been so bluntly and obviously pastiched in a novel that had tongues wagging for a year.

It’s no use, though. She’s beaten her head against this particular wall for nearly half her life now, and the presence of Mr G—’s portrait on her wall isn’t going to fill in those blanks. But she always gets lost in Lord Henry’s prose—disgustingly elegant for something never really intended for publication, if a bit affected—and the afternoon shades into evening; her tea grows cold. Eventually she puts her head down on the table just for a moment’s rest.

“There you are.” She sits up and turns sharply. Her own writing-desk is gone, replaced by a delicate confection of ebony, and behind her, Mr G— stands in his sunbeam, by his little table. He approaches, smiling. “I wish this wasn’t the only way I could speak to you. But really, you’re lucky to be able to do this at all. Perhaps it’s because you’re a Wotton and have a connection, or you have some latent psychic talent? Or both?” He shrugs; whatever he’s talking about, it only concerns him a little. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re back.”

“I was reading—” She looks back at the little ebony table. It’s empty.

“Harry’s papers.” He folds his arms and leans against the wall beside her, a curiously contemporary way of carrying himself, it seems. “Your life’s work, I gather. I—well, it isn’t quite correct to say that I _see_ my surroundings, but I perceive them—it’s a little difficult to explain.” He frowns slightly, pretty even in his perplexity. “Your study—I know it’s out there. It’s a bit of a mess.” He laughs. “I’m only teasing. You actually work in there; of course it’s a mess. Anyway, I perceive on your shelf— _A Persian Carpet: The Unabridged Diaries of Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward_ , edited and with an introduction by Isobel Wotton. _Always Summer: The Complete Letters of Basil Hallward_. _A House in Algiers_. And all the rest. You're very prolific, Lady Isobel.”

“No one calls me that. It's Isobel or Dr Wotton. Or Bel, if you're family.”

“Can I call you Bel? I am almost family, in a way.” He smiles at her, so sweetly she cannot imagine denying him anything. “Harry was my dearest friend once. But you know that.”

All right, Isobel thinks. If this is the weird story my subconscious wants to spin for me about my life’s work, I’ll play along. “You know,” she says, “I only know your initial. He blotted out your full name.”

The young man laughs softly. “Of course he did. That’s surprisingly considerate of him, really. But I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out; I got the impression you were smarter than that.”

My subconscious is insulting me, she thinks.

“I’m Dorian Gray, Bel. The original.”

She shakes her head. “That’s—that’s just a name that Wilde made up. Or … borrowed. Dorian, after the Grecian mode, with a secondary ‘coterie’ meaning. Dorian love. Greek love. Same thing.” My mind is _ridiculous_.

He smiles at her, the indulgent look of a tutor whose student is barking with the greatest determination up the wrong tree. “No, Bel. It really is my name. It isn’t a pseudonym; it isn’t code. My name is Dorian Gray, and I met your uncle in Basil Hallward’s studio, the day that Basil finished his portrait of me. Don’t waste your time looking for me. Harry blotted it out, and you will never be able to separate out references to other Messrs. Gray from those that refer only to me. I made sure of that.”

There’s a rushing in her ears; surely this is all a fabrication of an overheated, over-educated brain. She’s dreaming. She’s spent so much time on this subject, and now under the spell of that painting, that she’s conflating biography and fiction and legend. The Unknown Gentleman—Mr Gray—Dorian reaches out and takes hold of her hand, and she realises she can feel it; she can smell Parma violets on him. Her dreams are never this real.

“Where are you?” she asks. But before he can answer, a gale scented with ocean salt blows in through the studio window, ripping through the curtains and filling the room with ash.

Isobel jerks awake. Her hand is numb; it’s been lying at an odd angle over her tablet and seems to have fallen asleep. The dream lingers and pushes at the back of her eyeballs, forceful in a way that her dreams rarely are. She draws a deep breath and for a second could swear she smells violets.

Ridiculous. The room is cold; she needs to turn on the heat for the first time in the season. She staggers to her feet and pauses for a moment, studying the portrait of the Unknown Gentleman. No, it’s quite unchanged; Dorian is as beautiful as ever—

She shouldn’t call him Dorian, dreams or no dreams. That promotes an unproven notion with no research to back it, and that’s a bad habit for an academic, even in the privacy of her own thoughts.

Her heart seems to flop around in her chest, then calms down, settling into its normal beat. She shivers. Time to turn on the heat. She closes up her books.

* * *

Her initial resolve fades before she even realises it and soon the Unknown Gentleman is forever Dorian to her, though she’s certain it’s silly and she’d sooner die than admit it to anyone out loud. Besides, what is she going to do with this information? Write a paper on it? It’s a fantasy not even worthy of the most heavily stoned freshman English major.

One night in mid-October, up to her eyebrows in mid-term papers whilst the students are all on recess, she dozes off again in her study, but only for a moment. Twenty minutes, perhaps. Just long enough to dip a toe into the waters of dream-sleep. Dorian is there, standing at the window before the tussore-silk curtains.

“There was a time when there would have been a lot more people here,” he says. “Sibyl Vane. James Vane. Harry’s sister Gwendolen, my sister Isadora, a singer named Rosina. A rock star named Otto, you won’t have heard of him. Constance, my uncle’s housekeeper. Tobias. Spencer. Basil. When you live as long as I lived out in the world, you accumulate a lot of ghosts. They’ve gone now. I suppose it was worth it for that much, at least.”

She tries to answer, but her mouth seems to be stopped. Dorian frowns, sensing her perturbation, her unwilling silence. He reaches out to her, offering a sprig of lilac. "Harry loved lilacs,” he says.

She reaches out to take the sprig, but before her hand can close on it, she wakes with a lump in her throat that she doesn’t understand. She puts her tablet aside and gets to her feet, moving closer to the painting.

You don’t touch these things; she knows that. _Once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him._ The temptation to do just that has never been so strong.

“Dorian,” she whispers. How has she allowed herself to believe this? How has she become so invested in these odd dreams? Maybe she’s going mad. It’s certainly a lot more plausible than the idea that you’ve made contact with the spirit of your ancestor’s dearest friend, who, not incidentally, is the actual formerly-living Dorian Gray, which was the real name of the real person whose identity has been driving you and other academics around the bend for decades.

She leans her forehead against the frame of the portrait and closes her eyes. “Dorian,” she whispers again. A chill passes across the muscle where her neck and shoulder meet. It’s as if someone is in the room with her, standing very close by.

“Bel.”

Her eyes snap open and she jerks away from the painting, staggering backward and falling on her arse in the middle of the study. Her heart feels like it’s trying to break out of her ribs. That wasn’t her imagination. She heard it—her nickname, whispered in her ear. She could have sworn that she felt breath stir her hair.

But the room is empty, and the young man in the painting still regards her with that look of mild, sweet surprise.

She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes, takes a deep breath, counts to ten. She collects her tablet and goes to finish marking papers in the kitchen.

* * *

Saturday, October 26 is a grey day with a dull drizzle of rain, and Isobel has a cold. Her last lecture on Friday was a nightmare of scraping through with a sore throat, so she quietly declares Saturday a personal holiday, to be spent curled up on the couch in her study with something to read that has nothing to do with queer Victorians.

She’s more tired than she realises and drifts off into slumber.

And Dorian Gray is waiting for her. He sits down on the Persian divan beside her, like an old friend.

“The painting makes people uneasy. You know that, I’m sure—you did your research. Even the most dulled of minds seem to be aware that it’s not normal. But none of them have been able to do what you’re doing now.”

“Which is what?”

“Look around you. Don’t you recognise this? The tapestries? The curtain? Why, even the sheet music. You’re inside the painting, Bel. Where I’ve been trapped for forty years.”

How has she never realised this before? How every time her dreams bring her here, the room is always the same, and he is always standing in the same place? She looks around, slowly understanding. The sheet music, always curled on the little table. The angle of the light. The easel, the piano, the divan. Features not in the painting, but were in Basil’s studio the day he signed his name in those graceful vermilion letters in the corner of the painting. The room, she realises, has no doors. Only that window.

“How?” she asks, feeling stupid.

“It’s all true, you know,” he says, leaning back on the divan and stretching out his legs. “Oscar might have embellished a little—but everything happened more or less exactly as he wrote it. He was my beloved friend … my confessor. I told him everything—things I couldn’t even tell your uncle—I’m just going to call him your uncle; all those ‘greats’ become tedious. Your uncle never really listened. He only waited for a hook off which he could hang one of his own epigrams. I loved him for it, but that was why I could never tell him … so many things. I certainly couldn’t tell him about Basil.”

“They were lovers. At Oxford.”

“Yes. Your uncle could be cruel—dazzlingly, marvellously cruel, stealing his erstwhile lover’s new beloved out from under his nose, as easily as breathing. But I couldn’t be so cruel as to tell him that I’d murdered his oldest friend.” He says it so calmly, so evenly. Only the way he looks at his hands suggests what might be going on beneath the pretty surface.

Isobel can think of nothing to say, and so Dorian goes on. “That wish I made in Basil’s studio, that bargain I made—it came true. One thing Oscar was wrong about, though—I didn’t destroy the painting, not then. Oh no, I lived … oh, I _lived_ , Bel, for so long. I buried everyone I ever cared for—your uncle, my sister, innumerable lovers. The man I loved most, I watched as he burned to ash in the morning sun—he was a vampire, and do you know, that isn’t the strangest thing I saw in my long life. But it couldn’t last. Nothing lasts.”

He rises and goes to the easel, which is empty. From the table next to the easel he picks up a palette knife. “Forty years ago, this very night, I picked up this very knife and did that thing I ought to have done a century before.” He swings his arm sharply and Isobel flinches, but the knife only cuts empty air. Dorian bows his head, relaxes his hand, lets the knife fall to the floor.

“I brought this upon myself. Time had caught up with me. The dead had caught up with me. And I was ready, I thought, to make an end of it. I thought I’d know peace. I felt my body wither and die, Bel. And I felt the dead—my dead—I felt them go. But instead of peace, I found myself here.” He laughs, bitterly. “It’s better than haunting a house, I suppose. The painting moves around, and I get a little change of scenery every now and then.” He steps away from the easel and returns to the divan. “I’m sorry if I’ve been going on a bit. It’s just … been a very long time since I had someone to talk to.”

“I’m a better listener than my uncle,” Isobel says. She reaches over and takes his hand. His skin is smooth, cool; she has to resist the urge to lift his hand to her lips, to kiss the graceful fingers. “I still have a hard time believing that this isn’t just a dream,” she says. “I’ve been so steeped in my uncle’s diaries for so long—I can practically recite some of his letters from memory. To say nothing of Oscar’s book.” She shakes her head. “I don’t understand how this has happened. Or why. But I suppose I do believe it now. That this is all real, that I really am talking to you—the elusive Mr G—.”

“Shall I tell you another story?” he asks, smiling. She nods.

She will remember his stories later, with shocking clarity; they do not fade as dreams do. As he confesses to her, the details seem to drift through the room—the smell of a sickroom in the attic of a disreputable Parisian hotel, the click of mah-jongg tiles, a famous writer's brilliant laugh. His honesty burns and sometimes—often—she thinks she should be repelled at what he has done, at the horrors of his own life that he scarcely seems to comprehend even as he describes them. She cannot offer absolution, and he seems to know that. But she can listen.

She does not notice that the room has darkened until the breeze that has been drifting softly through the curtains picks up with abrupt violence. With a crash, the windows smash open, glass shattering. The howling wind brings with it a smell of burning, of salt air, of blood.

Dorian leaps to his feet, clutching Isobel’s hand.

“What's happening?”

“I don’t know. It’s never happened before, not like this.” He’s trembling, terrified. “Isobel, you have to wake up. You have to get out.”

“How?”

“There.” Behind them, where there was once a smooth wall, there is now a door, only just ajar. Light, brighter than sunlight, spills through that crack.

“Go, Isobel. Hurry. It’s the only way.” Still clutching her hand, he hurries to the door, dragging her with him. “Go on. Leave me here.”

“But—” The wind whips with greater violence; there’s a stinging against her face, small flecks of dirt or sand or glass.

“You must. Please, Isobel.”

Shading her eyes against the glare, she pushes the door open wider. It’s suddenly a struggle; the wind that fills the room tries to push it closed again, but she manages to wedge her body into the gap. And then she looks back.

Dorian Gray stands there, lit from head to foot in the bright white light spilling through the door, an ancient expression of immeasurable grief on his face. She knows, somehow—she can’t say how—that if she steps through this door, she won’t be able to come back. That Dorian Gray will be trapped here, for another forty years—fifty—a hundred—more?

She will never be able to explain the impulse that takes hold of her then. With an almighty effort, she forces the door open wider. She reaches back and seizes Dorian by the wrist, and before he can say no or stop her, she forces them both through the brilliant gap.

Her ears are filled with a harsh, ripping noise—the sound of a canvas being split open from top to bottom with a sharp knife. She feels like she’s falling, falling for a very long way, and when she lands, breathless, she is on the floor of her study, face-down.

She rolls to her side and looks up, and the first thing she sees is the picture of Dorian Gray on her wall. Something terrible is happening to it. The skin withers, the hair whitens and fades, the eyes grow dull. Terrible sores appear, burst, run. The hands are awash in blood. Grievous wounds open in the flesh and suppurate, the flesh blackens as if burned. A century of torment and horror, played out in an instant.

Isobel’s heart is jerking in her chest, and she can’t seem to get her breath.

“Bel. Bel. Stay with me, Bel, _please_ …”

And there’s Dorian Gray’s beautiful face, blue eyes full of tears, bent over her as her vision darkens.

* * *

The beeping is what wakes her up; it won’t bloody _stop_. There is a smell of antiseptic in her nostrils, and there seem to be an infinitude of things stuck to her body. A hospital. Why is she in a—

Memory slams into her with a rush that is nearly physical, sending the heart monitors into fits.

It’s a few days before the cardiologist is ready to discharge her. He tells her with some regret that the PVCs were actually a symptom related to some underlying problems, and she was lucky to have been saved from full cardiac arrest. A young man named Gray—one of her students?—had called 911 for her, and it was a good thing he was there.

When she finally returns home, she knows before she walks into the study that the portrait will be gone. Instead, there’s a letter on her desk—handwritten, so strange these days, in a beautiful old-fashioned hand.

> Isobel,
> 
> Of your uncle, Oscar once wrote that he was the only friend who stood by me, and that “in the eyes of some it was a question whether it was an honour or a disgrace”. Similarly, I don’t know if what you have done is a favour or a curse—but for now, I shall call it a favour. I suppose I was not so ready to be penned up in a painting for all eternity after all. I don’t understand how you were able to do that, or why. But I thank you. Someday I shall find a way to repay you. But I think you will not see me again in this life. I am very good at disappearing, and I believe you are far better with me gone.
> 
> I have taken the painting, as you have no doubt noticed. I didn’t think you’d be very comfortable with the image of the transformed Mr G— on your wall. Have no fear, it will be safe. I am sorry for your brother’s loss of his investment—I shall find some way to make this up to him as well.
> 
> Live well, Dr Isobel Wotton. Don’t seek me out again, for that is the surest way to guarantee that a good life will not be yours.
> 
> Dorian Gray

They manage to keep the second disappearance of Hallward’s masterpiece quiet—a theft while she was in the hospital, Isobel says. As briefly as a year later, the whole episode seems to have the quality of a dream, and only the bill from the auction-house remains as proof that any of it ever happened. Strangely, certain of Phillip’s investments prove more profitable than he’d anticipated in the meanwhile, and in the end he scarcely misses the loss. Disaster, Phillip declares over Christmas dinner the following year, inevitably rolls off a Wotton like water off the proverbial duck’s—and even though she rolls her eyes at her brother’s idea of what a “disaster” is, she has to admit that he has a point. They’re all still there, after all, regardless of infamy.

When Isobel returns to work after the Christmas holiday, consternation arises over an anonymous package that arrives, addressed to her. Campus security is called; there are X-rays, sniff tests. The package is finally judged safe, and Isobel takes it back to her office to open it.

As soon as she realises what it is, she has to sit down, breathe deeply, and take her heart medication.

There is a heavy bundle of letters, which turn out to be written in a handwriting she knows intimately now—the graceful looping scrawl of Lord Henry Wotton. Letters, some chatty, some passionate—letters she’s never seen before. And there is a sheet of heavy rag paper with a sketch of a young man—a preliminary version of what would eventually become a massive three-quarter-length portrait. Written in the corner in Basil Hallward’s elongated script is a name, the same name as the recipient of Lord Henry’s letters. The name of Dorian Gray.

**Author's Note:**

> I am heavily indebted to the work of editor Nicholas Frankel on _The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition_ , and, of course, to Scott Handcock, Alexander Vlahos, and the fantastic crew of writers and actors at Big Finish.


End file.
